Tag: Houston

The Arkema plant in Crosby, Texas, is about 25 miles northeast of Houston. It lost power and its backup generators amid Harvey’s deluge, leaving it without refrigeration for chemicals that become volatile as the temperature rises.

I’ve been waiting for years to buy a brand new cadillac
But now that I’ve got one I want to send it right back
I can’t afford the gas to fill my luxury limousine
But even if I had the dough no one’s got no gasoline

I went to my local dealer to see if he could set me straight
He said there’s a little gas going but I’d have to wait
But he offered some red hot speed and some really high grade hash
But a gallon of gas can’t be purchased anywhere for any amount of cash

I can score you some coke and some grade one grass
But I can’t get a gallon of gas
I’ve got some downers some speed all the drugs that you need
But I can’t get a gallon of gas
There’s no more left to buy or sell
There’s no more oil left in the well
A gallon of gas can’t be purchased anywhere
For any amount of cash

Two extra verses from long version:
I love your body-work, but you’re really no use
How can I drive you when I got no juice?
Because it’s stuck in neutral and my engine’s got no speed
And the highways are deserted
And the air smells unnaturally clean.

It’s got power-assisted overdrive and carpets on the floor,
But it’s parked out front just like a dead dinosaur.
And I’ll be paying off the bank for 45 years or more.
It should go 100 miles an hour,
But it’s never moved away from my door.

Who needs a car and a seven-forty-seven
When you can’t buy a gallon of gas
Who needs a highway, an airport or a jet
When you can’t get a gallon of gas
There’s no more left to buy or sell
There’s no more oil left in the well
A gallon of gas can’t be purchased anywhere
For any amount of cash
You can’t buy a gallon of gas

Graeber

Contemporary, bureaucratic corporate capitalism was a creation not of Britain, but of the United States and Germany, the two rival powers that spent the first half of the twentieth century fighting two bloody wars over who would replace Britain as a dominant world power—wars that culminated, appropriately enough, in government-sponsored scientific programs to see who would be the first to discover the atom bomb. It is significant, then, that our current technological stagnation seems to have begun after 1945, when the United States replaced Britain as organizer of the world economy.

Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of bureaucrats—quite the opposite—but the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union did not lead to the domination of the market, but, in fact, cemented the dominance of conservative managerial elites, corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

If we do not notice that we live in a bureaucratic society, that is because bureaucratic norms and practices have become so all-pervasive that we cannot see them, or, worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.

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Cioran

“To send someone a book is to commit a burglary—a case of breaking and entering. It is to trample down his solitude, what he holds most sacred, for it is to oblige him to desist from himself in order to think about your thoughts.”
-Cioran

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Quote of the Day

“All the world’s longest zipline’s flights are cancelled until further notice and we will be in direct contact with all our customers by phone immediately.”
– Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi

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John Gray

‘Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.’ If humans disturb the balance of the Earth they will be trampled on and tossed aside. Critics of Gaia theory say they reject it because it is unscientific. The truth is that they fear and hate it because it means that humans can never be other than straw dogs.
-John Gray

There are, to be sure, a number of websites purporting to represent the Illuminati, but none is very professional-looking.
-Niall Ferguson

It was an idea. I don't know. Who knows where they fucking come from. Isaac Newton invented gravity cause some asshole hit him in the head with an apple.
-Christopher Moltisanti

James Howard Junstler

2017 was a spectacular year for intellectual collapse among the political Left, but especially for its subsidiaries on campus. The trauma of Donald Trump’s election victory put this faction into a fugue state in which no opportunity for coercion and persecution of imagined enemies could be missed. The victim-oppressor politics spawned by the critical-theory-for-lunch-bunch has produced an ideology in which “inclusion” means segregated dorms, racially separate graduation ceremonies, and (at Harvard) closing down age-old men’s and women’s voluntary social associations. And “diversity” means as long as you express the exact same ideas we do.

"The action was one that rewarded itself."
- Scipio Africanus, 218 B.C.

I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle.
宁在宝马车里哭，也不在自行车上笑
-Ma Nuo

“I think that when the United States felt they were at the forefront of the so-called civilized world and when the Soviet Union collapsed, they were under the illusion that the United States was capable of everything and they could act with impunity. And that’s always a trap, because in this situation, a person and a country begins to commit mistakes. There is no need to analyze the situation. No need to think about the consequences. No need to economize. And the country becomes inefficient and one mistake follows another. And I think that’s the trap the United States has found itself in.”